would weaken her. Once he became a king,
Asterion, so pliant now, might try
to rule alone. But she had to mollify
the royal scribes, who kept their fingers still
at her command. Your justly famous skill
in writing makes you anxious to protect
the archives against the dangers indirect
succession poses. I appreciate
your patience. Nine years is too long to wait
to hear these words: I love Asterion,
but I won’t marry him—or anyone.
Why is it necessary to deflower
a queen to make an heir? I’ll keep my power,
but promise you your archives will not burn.
The scribes all bowed with dutiful if stern
expressions on their faces—all, except
the recent exile Suladade, who kept
smirking at the queen while he seemed to gnash
the teeth behind his lips. He came from Kasch,
where he murdered his nephew, or, some said,
his glyphs provoked such jealousy he fled
to The White Walls, and won a place at court
through sheer talent, though he made his swart
colleagues look pale beside him and spoke Egyptian
with an accent requiring decryption.
Berenib climbed her tower that night and dreamed
that Suladade besieged her door and reamed
the keyhole with his reed. He drew a snail
between her breasts, which drilled its silver trail
into the heart beneath. When she awoke,
she felt an urgent need to hug and stroke
the white bull busy practicing his glyphs
at dawn. She couldn’t think of any gifts
that would appeal to him: he was content
with sand and grass and shade. Although she bent
before his latest efforts and pretended
to care about his writing, she intended
to entice him with her flesh. Asterion
panicked when the queen began to shun
his company. Then late one sleepless night
he rose from bed and saw the white bull write
a rhombus underneath a hoe beside
a sitting man, and saw the queen’s robe glide
to the dim ground. He didn’t see the arm
the bull’s bulk blocked. He rushed to do him harm
before he took more pleasure from the queen.
He gored white dewlaps, having not foreseen
how much blood his little horns would tap.
Berenib held the white head in her lap
and cursed Asterion. The scribes appointed
themselves as regents. Berenib’s disjointed
mind must rest. The white bull’s murderer
deserved a punishment that would incur
the people’s rage. How could the scribes, who’d said
the Cretan was a god, now want him dead?
The people built so many temples, brought
so many lambs to smooth palmed scribes who taught
them that the god would heed their piety
and guard their souls because their gifts were free.
This problem stumped the scribes till Suladade
came up with an idea: What if we made
the god a temple structured like a maze,
where we could hide him from the people’s gaze?
A simple one wouldn’t work. They’d spare no cost
to ensure that once he entered, he’d stay lost
deep in a copious network of corridors
whose bending walls would start to look like floors
to anyone who wandered there for long:
even the bricks would wander, like a song
without refrain or like the Phrygian river
who frustrates boatmen seeking to deliver
punctual cargo: Maeander flows for fun,
backward and forward; his currents rarely run
from source to sea directly but loop back
doodling many a marshy cul de sac—
Daedalus made the maze so difficult
that it was necessary to consult
his blueprints for the engineer to find
a way out of the prison he designed.
So this was where they trapped Asterion,
all of whose relatives, except the sun,
let him lose his childhood out of sight
while Minos reconstructed his appetite
for the queen’s bed, whose linen nine months later
welcomed a shrill and bloody decorator,
Glaukos, who crowned upon its twisting rucks:
many may suffer when a fat king fucks.
The labyrinth perverted Knossos: docks
crisscrossed the harbor like an upturned box
of kindling, and what helped the casual fisher
threatened to make a pauperizing scissure
in every merchant’s hull; the marketplace
multiplied stalls until there was no space
between them, and a visitor would need
a guide to cross that warren of stunted greed;
the palace, once an undivided hall,
became a complex in whose frescoed sprawl
a boy could lose himself. Pasiphaë
let Glaukos wander while she faced the sea
and wept the orange out of aching eyes
and tried to feel the seminal surprise
of the white bull’s opening the wiggly blue.
Her unremunerated retinue
one day lost track of Glaukos while he rolled
a ball named Sminth. Though someone should have told
the boy that ball was not a real mouse,
were Glaukos was like his father, then to douse
his dear delusion would be suicide;
no Cretan tethered honesty to pride.
At high noon Minos came to chew a gray
discus of beef upon a gilded tray
as was his habit, but he startled all
the waiting slaves by asking them to call
Glaukos to the table. No one knew
where he had gone, a fault the hitherto
indifferent father rushed to castigate:
when all else failed, he knew that he was great
again the moment he unclenched his fist
and saw the queen’s slaves lift their chins and twist
between red pillars, while the guards who’d kicked
the footstools bearing up the women flicked
spit from their eyes and almost made the king
laugh with their mimicry of wriggling,
then joined the soldiers rummaging the palace
to find the son and skirt the father’s malice.
When rummaging turned up no hideaway,
Minos decided to send Hupakoë
to Delphi, where an oracle would bore
holes in the ignorance he couldn’t ignore.
Now harvest crammed the Cretan granaries,
and in a month or two the bays would freeze,
and they’d be stuck in Phocis till nigh spring
with nothing but the Pythia’s babbling
and chilblained shepherd boys to pass the time.
But saying No to Minos was a crime.
Crossing the stormy Archipelago
proved easier than courting the undertow
of royal paranoia. Minos guessed
the queen regarded one less orange crest
streaking her sight no reason for real grief.
Her mourning magnified his disbelief
as Minos waited for Hupakoë
to tell him where the prince’s body lay.
Did she already know? Was that a smirk
wrinkling her black veil’s openwork?
Minos decided that he ought to die, / Minos decided that the queen must die,
but wondering how best to satisfy
this obligation stayed his stubby hand
until Hupakoë toed Cretan sand
and told them what the Pythia declared:
when light and darkness equitably shared
the hours from one sunrise to the next,
yokels would fear their cattle could be hexed
and bear an even odder herbivore;
whoever came up with the metaphor
that best described the monster was the one
who’d find the body of the king’s lost son.
After the equinox, a cowherd came
to Knossos with the calf that won him fame
although this poem will not preserve his name:
at dawn the calf was white, by noon maroon,
and by dusk darker than the sweetest prune.
Summoned by Minos, the Athenian engineer
didn’t expect the crux of his career
awaited him at court. Although he viewed
the calf from every angle, no wit ensued.
After a day of watching Daedalus
watch the calf and take superfluous
measurements, Minos told him, That’s enough!
If you’re so smart, you shouldn’t find this tough.
Why can’t you come up with one metaphor?
But dazzled by the morphing calf, the more
he stared the more he stuttered, and the king
did not restrain himself from mimicking
the man who’d fled the home of oratory.
It was an Argive who would win the glory
the Athenian took for granted: Polyeidos,
the bard who gave the queen her day-to-day dose
of sad songs, asked permission to propose
a metaphor. Speak up, if not, who knows
how long we’ll have to wait for D-D-D-
D-Daedalus to show Calliope
hasn’t entirely deserted him.
A metaphor is not a synonym—
something this reject cannot comprehend.
Argive, proceed. I hope you don’t pretend
to know more than you can deliver us:
you’ll get worse treatment than old Daedalus.
The bard spoke: Lord, this multicolored calf
is a mulberry. The king’s garotted laugh,
which no one standing there had heard before,
confirmed the bard had found the metaphor.
Pasiphaë concealed a smile beneath
her left hand, while the Athenian ground his teeth—
a failed attempt to clot his dripping eyes.
Excellent, Argive! You deserve a prize—
but not before you find where Glaukos is.
The harper’s hands, beaded with calluses,
received three objects from the plush-palmed king:
a sword, an unplumed helmet, and a ring
of keys. He’s probably nearby, so you
should track down places that my retinue
have overlooked in their moronic haste.
If nothing turns up, Glaukos probably chased
Sminth in the labyrinth. You could get gored—
that’s why you’ll take the helmet and the sword.
Because of dopey Daedalus, you must wait
to start the search. I hope dawn leads you straight
to my poor Glaukos. Don’t forget: you’ve raised
my hopes. It’s too late now to fail unfazed.
The palace occupied its western edge
with a garden, whose unsevered sedge
cuffed fishponds where carp rarely came to grief
since Minos made it wrong to not eat beef.
The bard’s heels burst each algae rind in vain:
no lost prince rotted on the graveled tain.
The bard crawled under every bush for naught:
thorned shade denied the hiding place he sought.
The bard then checked the vine-choked sheds, where hoes,
rakes, pails, and lichened shovels taught repose
to spiders linking them with lasting threads.
He liked this place: the polymorphous dreads,
with which attendance on the queen harassed
the bard, relented here; the squawking blast
of royal irritations quit his ears,
replaced by breezes, birdsong, and the tears
dripped by the Minotaur. The bard came close
to pastoral, forgetting his morose
mission to find the king’s presumed-dead son.
He walked along a wall where moss had spun
a mural that abstained from imitation.
Buzzing disrupted his idle exploration:
a swooping owl scattered bees and sipped
old rainfall from the threshold of a crypt
that bore no letters in its verdigris
to sieve its tenant out of sheer decease.
The owl showed the bard a weary face,
screeched, and launched a solitary race
toward the sky in which it disappeared.
Returning bees amassed a second beard
on Polyeidos, who recalled the ring
that dangled bits and bows, but opening
the cellar door transformed his angled knees
into sore sundials as he plied the keys,
none of which would turn inside the wards
(tempting the bard to break them with the sword’s
tip, though the king might call it vandalism)
except the last he tried. Unknown to chrism,
the cellar door screeched louder than the owl
as Polyeidos lifted it. The foul
air, which defiled his nostrils, traded one
dark hollow for another while the sun
limned seeming limits of posterity:
hanging headlong in honey, the absentee
showed Polyeidos nothing but his feet,
which rotted so his mouth could steal a treat.
They broke off when the bard pulled Glaukos out:
the viscid orange hair revoked all doubt.
The vat preserved the boy as though he’d drowned
moments, not months, before. The gnawing sound
of bees took on a different timbre: flies
assembled in the crypt to burglarize
the stolen honey, and while most preferred
the open vat, its recent inmate lured
a multitude. The bard bore Glaukos home
adorned with flies and chips of honeycomb.
While Minos wept, Pasiphaë directed
slaves to clean the body and detected
many small wounds, in which she rubbed her balm.
Daedalus had revived his old aplomb
and started to design the prince’s tomb,
but Minos knew that hubris leads to doom
only because most men give up too soon.
You will not bury him. He’s as immune
to death as I am, or I’ll make him so.
The gods delighted in my overthrow
of city after city when I beat
all Greece into submission. Death won’t cheat
me now—the gods will always side with Crete!